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Archives for November 2009

News this morning is that AOL is going down the path already cleared by companies like Demand Media and Associated Content, and getting into the business of commissioning small content “piecework” based on consumer interest as gauged by search queries (and advertiser interest as gauged by keyword prices).

In other words: if you know people are searching for “how do I fix a flat tire?”, you crank out a quick web page, SEO it up, and sit back. As long as you make a little more cash from the search ads on the page than you spent on the writing, you’ve got yourself a business model. It’s an “automated story factory,” as Peter Kafka at AllThingsD puts it.

This sweatshop approach to content creation is, of course, anathema to old-fashioned writers and editors. It raises all sorts of disturbing questions about the advertising cart leading the editorial horse (as PaidContent suggests). It holds no appeal to me, personally. It is the polar opposite of what most bloggers do: For the most part they remain — as I argued in Say Everything and as the most recent Technorati survey continues to show — motivated by their own interests and passions, not by the fleeting prospect of fame or revenue.

And yet, as my knee jerks instinctively against the “crank out just-good-enough content” approach, I also start to wonder, why isn’t some enterprising old-media company doing something like this to support its newsroom? If this is the way advertising revenue works on the Web today, why not exploit it for yourself? Why let the AOLs and Demand Medias own the pie? If there are advertising vs. editorial issues to be navigated, why wouldn’t traditional editors and publishers want a say in how they’re resolved?

This is the sort of thing I was imagining when I wrote, earlier this year, that media companies should start from the revenue side in order to figure out new models for supporting the socially important but economically imperiled work of journalism.

Certainly, the New York Times or Time magazine aren’t going to want to sully their brands with such stuff — but why not create a new down-market brand owned by the same company?

Most freelance writers have, for their own survival, always resorted to a parallel strategy: they do high-paying but not always fulfilling work part of the time so they can do work that they enjoy but that doesn’t necessarily pay the bills the rest of the time.

While SEO-driven piecework doesn’t pay well per page, collectively it appears to generate real profit. That money can go to fill an entrepreneur’s wallet, but it could also fund journalism. Maybe that’s what Tim Armstrong plans at AOL: let the generic junk pay the salaries of old-fashioned journalists he’s hiring. Why wouldn’t the owner of an old-line newsroom do the same thing? Why haven’t they done so already?

UPDATE: Danny Sullivan connects the dots: AOL et al. are finding ways to make money from those search visitors that newspaper companies have lately been dismissing as worthless.

It was always flattering and humbling to me to hear Dreaming in Code spoken of in the same breath as The Soul of a New Machine. With Say Everything I also had a model in mind: Hackers, Steven Levy’s groundbreaking and still-valuable account of the pioneering mavericks of hacker culture — which first taught me, back in the early ’80s, that there was a fascinating and important cultural story brewing in the computer rooms I’d haunted as a high-school student. In fact, we considered titling the book Bloggers, partly as homage to Levy’s work.

Say Everything is not only a delightful history of the form but a surprisingly broad account that touches on a number of major issues of the past decade, quietly making a case that blogs now play an indispensable role….

Rosenberg’s approach is to tell the stories of the storytellers, constructing his brief history of blogging by way of the bloggers themselves. He does this so well that it appears almost serendipitous that each aspect of his subject is almost perfectly embodied by the story of one or two individuals….

Rosenberg is a mensch, resisting cheap shots even when his subjects behave badly. But he is quick to puncture pretense, whether it comes from the self-importance of bloggers suddenly thrust into the public eye, or the snobbery of mainstream media dismissing citizen postings because their authors lack the training or credentials to participate in a national discussion…

Ironically, Rosenberg’s extended encomium of blogging also turns out to be an implicit defense of another allegedly endangered form: the book. Only by such an extended and well-organized presentation can Rosenberg both give us a comprehensive account of blogging and successfully argue for its importance. The pages of Say Everything provide not only an expertly curated burst of information, but also entertainment for several evenings. The book provides thought and provocation. It illuminates the deep economic challenges of the Internet. And, as is the case with blog postings, Rosenberg speaks with the clarity and wit of an authentic voice — even after the highly filtered, far-from-real-time processing of a major publisher. That’s why I think Say Everything is the best technology-related business book of the year.

Here’s what turns out to be the most intractable problem I’ve encountered in my move to OSX as my primary work platform:

For years I used a programmers’ text editor tool in Windows called Ultraedit. It worked great and allowed me to record macros. The most indispensible one, which I used constantly, was for automating the creation of HTML links. I would store the link-to URL in a clipboard, select some link text and start the macro. The macro would magically surround the link text with the proper HTML code to link it to the URL in the clipboard.

I achieved this by
(a) copying the link text to a second clipboard;
(b) typing the <a href=”

(c) pasting in the URL from the first clipboard;
(d) closing the tag with “>
(e) pasting the link text from clipboard #2;
(f) ending the link with </a>

It sounds kinda complicated but it worked beautifully, and Ultraedit’s macro recorder simply “got it.” I created the macro years ago, and its keyboard shortcut became hardwired in my memory.

Now I’m using TextWrangler and, alas, AppleScript doesn’t seem to get it at all. The AppleScript recorder seems to grab the actions at too specific a level — i.e., it doesn’t capture “switch to next clipboard” but records the specific clipboard number; it doesn’t capture “current active document” but records the specific document name that I happen to be using while I’m recording the script.

I was gearing myself up to learn enough AppleScript to try to write the script (or edit a recorded script well enough to make it work). Then I discovered that, perhaps thanks to Snow Leopard upgrade, the entire AppleScript recorder in TextWrangler doesn’t seem to work at all. When I record a script and try to save it I get the following error message: (MacOS Error code: -4960). As far as I can tell, I can’t save any scripts at all, making any AppleScript solution to this problem seem hopeless.

I know, I know, if I had learned emacs years ago I wouldn’t have any of these problems. But I didn’t. I welcome any tips/suggestions! Is there a text-editor for Mac that will make my life easier? (I used to use the full version of BBEdit, and, back in those days, it wasn’t any easier to script than Textwrangler.) Is there some obvious solution I’m missing?

Over at MediaShift’s Idea Lab blog, where as a Knight News Challenge grantee I’m posting occasionally, I’ve published a discussion of an interesting problem we’re grappling with at MediaBugs: How do you organize a set of categories for all the different kinds of mistakes journalists can make? Do weigh in over there and help us sort out this epistemological puzzle!

But rather than worry about whether the Internet is exerting a baleful influence, I think we just need to make our peace with the fact that every new technology creates a different space for cultural practice. Duran Duran without cable television or a high-end production studio is simply unthinkable. Recording technologies enabled the commodification of musical performance on a mass basis. Networked computers have crippled the profitability of that commodification. The adventure is ongoing.

Perhaps the digitally-enabled overhang of the cultural production of previous generations is a heavy burden. But I guarantee you that those artists who do break free of its restrictions, and can come up with something interesting to say, will be easier to find and easier to enjoy than any pioneers of any previous era were.

Taylor argues that, when it comes to music or any other form of art, the price of our “endless present” is the loss of a certain “magical power” that the artist was once able to wield over the audience. I suspect he’s right.

Carr seems a little bummed about that price, but I’m more sanguine: Our culture had swung way too far in the direction of artist worship anyway. Less fetishization of the purchased object and the personality who produced it is fine with me.

To me, it looks like Hoshaw gave the Times what it doubtless asked for in terms of fairly impersonal feature writing. The Times’s reluctance to capitalize on — or even link to! — the blog indicates the limits of its own willingness to embrace new modes of journalism far more than any problems or failures in the Spot.us model.

And the most rewarding part of the Spot.us project was getting to meet some of the donors in person before I left, listening to their ideas, writing to them on my blog from the middle of the ocean and emailing them when the story came out to celebrate our success.

I had images of my readers’ faces in my mind while I was at sea and it kept me accountable. These were real people not some unimaginable group called “the public.” I knew their names and I’d met with some of them in person. They were tangible and I thought, “what would Alex think if he knew I blogged on behalf of the ship or that I wasn’t diligent about taking photos at every opportunity?”

(Full disclosure: I was one of many people who kicked in a small donation via Spot.us to fund the garbage story.)

Ken Auletta is on KQED Forum right now, talking about his new Google book, and I just heard him comment on Google’s vulnerability to new competitors by hauling out the old complaint that Google’s provision of millions of results means it’s doing a poor job of serving it’s users.

“I searched for ‘the real William Shakespeare,’ ” he said (I’m paraphrasing), “and I got five million results. That’s useless.”

We hear this one all the time — and it gets Google’s value precisely wrong. When Google came along in the late ’90s we already had search engines, like AltaVista, that provided millions of results. Google is the antidote to the millions-of-results problem. All of Google’s value — and the reason that Google originally rose to prominence — was that it solved this problem, and got columnists like me to rave about its value while it was still a tiny startup company.

Let’s do that “real William Shakespeare” search. Right now I actually get 15 million results. Who cares? Nobody ever looks past the first, or at most the second or third, page of results. And Google’s first page of results on this query is not bad at all. Many of the top links are amateur-created content, but most of them provide useful secondary links. As a starting point for Web research it’s a pretty good tool. If you fine-tune your query to “Shakespeare authorship debate” you do even better.

Yes, it’s true that the Google search box is less useful with generalized product and commercial searches (like “London hotels”), where the results are laden with ads and fought over by companies armed with SEO tactics. Google has all sorts of flaws. But it’s time to bury the old “millions” complaints. They’re meaningless. And Auletta’s willingness to trot them out doesn’t give me much hope for the value of his new book.

Chittum applauds what he sees as a new appreciation in media circles for the “loyal readership” metric as opposed to the “total monthly visitors” tally, and argues, accurately enough, that the core readership — the fraction of your traffic that represents people who read a lot and keep coming back — is more valuable and important than the drop-ins, the folks who arrive via a search query, read a page, and then vanish. He airily dismisses the transient visitors as “junk traffic.”

This relative valuation of these two kinds of traffic is pretty obvious, and widely understood in the Web industry. Chittum concludes that newspapers shouldn’t be afraid to shut out the search traffic in their effort to convert the loyal readers into paying subscribers (though it’s not clear from his argument whether he means subscribers in print or on a pay-walled-off Web site).

There are two big problems with this analysis.

First, many advertisers, sadly, do not share Chittum’s perspective. When they evaluate a buy, they are often obsessed with “reach.” They want to hit lots of eyeballs. They are far less interested in the repeat visitors. Once they’ve shown you their ad once, they know that you’re probably not going to look at it again, even if they were lucky enough to catch your eye on the first exposure. Transient search traffic helps media sites satisfy these advertisers.

Second, and I think more important, Chittum completely ignores the way “junk traffic” visitors provide “qualified leads” to a Web site: they expose your site to new eyes and give you a shot, admittedly fleeting, and turning some fraction of them into loyal readers. This is the way sites have always built traffic “organically.” In the era of Facebook and Twitter that may be changing, but I’d argue that the principle still holds whether folks are landing on your article page via Google or a retweet. This is a far better way to expand your traffic base than expensive offline advertising.

Chittum’s analysis looks to me like a recipe for stagnation, a method media companies might adopt if they want to harvest cash from their websites to keep their offline products on life support. It’s this sort of thinking — “cash out the potential of the future to prolong the agony of the present” — that has dug so much of the media business such a deep hole already.

For years I organized my life with the wonderful, now-orphaned and somewhat antiquated Windows outliner Ecco Pro. For me Ecco was versatile enough to function effectively as both a todo-list manager and a repository for random information, scattered ideas and research. It really could do it all.

I’ve always used both Macs and PCs but this year I’ve migrated my main workspace over to OS X. There were many compelling reasons to do this, but I’ve had to struggle with finding an Ecco replacement. (Yes, I could run it on my Mac in a Windows virtual machine, but it’s a bit kludgy, and it’s time for me to move away from this program that, despite the efforts of many devotees, doesn’t look like it will ever be fully modernized.)

So far, it’s looking to me like there is no one Mac application that can serve in both roles (todo list and information organizer). OmniOutliner is a pretty good all purpose outliner, and it has a companion, “Getting Things Done”-based todo list program called OmniFocus. Though I’ve made my peace with OmniOutliner, I have not fallen in love with OmniFocus. It follows the David Allen GTD approach a little too rigidly for me, it has various features I don’t need and it’s missing some that I do want (as far as I’ve been able to tell, for instance, it lacks the ability to make some item vanish until a certain date when it reappears–what I call the “out of my face” tool).

So I’ve begun exploring various combinations of other tools. Right now, it’s Evernote for research/information and Things for todo management. I’m also going to look into Tinderbox, Yojimbo and some other applications that look promising. I know the Mac ecosystem is full of great products that sometimes have only small followings, so if there’s one you’re especially enamored of, do let me know.

I’ve also been playing around with Thinklinkr, a new Web-based outliner. It has one huge plus: It’s got an absolutely top-notch browser interface (it’s the only browser-based outlining tool I’ve found that is as responsive and fast as Ecco on the desktop — bravo for that!). At the moment, though, it’s a somewhat rudimentary tool; it lacks various features one might want, and it looks like it’s being aimed at the (important but different) market for collaborative outlining rather than personal information management. But it’s definitely worth a look if you’re into outlining.

This time, as befits the forum, I’ll be looking at the roots and nature of the long history of confrontation between professional journalists and bloggers, pointing out some positive directions that may lead us beyond the now well-worn grooves of that conflict, and offering some introductory perspectives about MediaBugs and how it fits in to that larger narrative.